Exponential View with Azeem Azhar

By HBR Presents / Azeem Azhar

How will the future unfold? What is the impact of technology on business & society? As technology reorders the world in which live, who will be the winners and who will be the losers? Join Azeem Azhar, curator of the Exponential View newsletter, in deep conversation with the world's leading thinkers and practitioners exploring these and other important questions.
The views expressed on this podcast are those of its hosts, guests, and callers, and not those of Harvard Business Review.

Renowned crisis manager, lawyer, author, and television producer, Judy Smith, the inspiration for the TV show “Scandal,” joins Azeem Azhar to discuss what tech businesses need to know to stay on top of their reputation in an era of instantaneous news and activist employees.

We've already been living with artificial decision-making machines for hundreds of years -- we call them corporations and states. That’s the argument David Runciman makes in conversation with Azeem Azhar in this week’s episode. Runciman is professor of politics at Cambridge University and host of the “Talking Politics” podcast. He and Azeem discuss what this reframing of artificial intelligence can teach us about navigating the hurdles it presents.

Reshma Sohoni, co-founder and managing partner Seedcamp (a seed-stage fund focusing on Europe), joins Azeem Azhar to discuss what it takes to build a thriving startup ecosystem outside Silicon Valley, and how some of Europe’s most successful startups were created.

One of the leading pioneers in the field of nanotechnology, physicist Sonia Contera joins Azeem Azhar to discuss how advances in biology, computing, and physics are bringing about another tech revolution that will change our lives.

Nicole Eagan, CEO of Darktrace, one of the world’s leading cybersecurity firms, joins Azeem Azhar to discuss how artificial intelligence is opening a new battlefield for hackers, governments, and private companies alike.

Meredith Whittaker, co-director of the AI Now Institute and one of the organizers of the Google Walkout in 2018, joins Azeem Azhar to discuss how discrimination and bias are influencing the development of artificial intelligence, and how tech workers are working to change their industry for the better.

The reinvention of craftsmanship started in Silicon Valley, and it’s spreading and reshaping the rules of work. This is the thesis of Laetitia Vitaud’s latest book, “Du labeur à l’ouvrage (From Labor to Work)," which explores how technology is unbundling the Fordist compact between corporation and worker and forcing a new employment paradigm for the digital age.

Azeem Azhar and Binyamin Appelbaum discuss how a group of free-market economists managed to reshape our modern world. They promised growth and broad prosperity, but instead left us with fractured societies and weakened democracies.
Appelbaum is the author of the new book, "The Economists’ Hour," a deep dive into the history of ideas that formed capitalism, as we know it.

Gary Marcus has a reputation for being a contrarian in the AI community. Over the past several years, Marcus, a neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and the author of “Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust,” has been a vocal critic of deep learning as the best way forward for AI. Marcus joins Azeem Azhar to discuss the alternatives for building better machine intelligence.

Peace is fragile, especially when anyone can use open source technology to build a weapon to inflict harm, online and offline. General Sir Richard Barrons, former Commander of the UK’s Joint Forces Command, makes the case to Azeem Azhar that, as the definition of warfare is changing, we all need to take a more active role in stewarding peace.

Economist Carlota Perez joins Azeem Azhar to discuss the life cycle of technology revolutions and how they ultimately change every aspect of society. Perez is optimistic about the future -- she explains how we can harness technology to foster green growth and global development.

Andrew Ng, former leader of Google’s and Baidu’s AI divisions, joins Azeem Azhar to discuss how businesses should approach AI adoption, and how machine intelligence will change industries and our work.

Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of the UK, joins Azeem Azhar in conversation about how the technology industry and policy makers can work together to amplify their potential to serve the public good. Regulating big tech, as Blair explains, is only a small part of the solution in a necessary effort to transform our society and economy for the exponential age.

A sneak peak of the new season of Azeem Azhar’s Exponential View podcast. This is the show that bridges the gap between two cultures: technology &amp; science on the one hand, and business &amp; society on the other. Azeem’s conversations help you better understand how the tech revolution is changing our world. Season launch: Wednesday, October 2, 2019.

Investors Carina Namih and Gigi Levy-Weiss come together with LabGenius founder James Field and science writer Oliver Morton to explore the opportunity of engineering biology to solve some of the world’s greatest challenges.

Daniel Schreiber, Lemonade’s CEO and cofounder, joins Azeem to discuss how the company is using artificial intelligence to disrupt a legacy industry by realigning incentives with the values that customers care about.

Stuart Russell, coauthor of the standard text on AI, “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach,” joins Azeem Azhar to discuss the progress of AI research and implementation and how to ensure the outcomes are beneficial.

“All digital infrastructure is used to shape human behavior in the direction that will be successful in the marketplace,” says Shoshana Zuboff, whose latest book, "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism," is a primer for understanding how technology companies are shaping our economy and society.

Jürgen Schmidhuber is a recognized pioneer in the field of deep neural networks. His techniques form the basis of the modern AI systems used by billions of people daily on services like Google, Facebook, and the Apple iPhone. Jürgen joins Azeem to discuss the next thirty years of artificial intelligence.

Citigroup leading analyst Ronit Ghose, Lemonade Insurance founder and CEO Daniel Schreiber, and OakNorth Bank founder and CEO Rishi Khosla discuss the new possibilities that AI offers the finance industry. Those who manage to use this emerging technology to reduce friction for customers will win.

Accenture’s Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, Paul Daugherty, discusses how to successfully integrate AI in your business: Do not think of it as bolt-on tech, but rather, as an opportunity to reimagine everything you do.

“We’re not even close to developing fully driverless cars,” urges Duke University professor Missy Cummings, a former fighter pilot and the director of the Humans and Autonomy Lab at Duke. She explores where automation currently is and paints a picture of the future with humans as integral parts of autonomous systems.

Theoretical physicist and founder of Genomic Prediction, Michigan State University senior vice president Stephen Hsu discusses the extraordinary developments in predictive genomics and digs into the ethical minefield that lies ahead: is the door now open to designer babies?

AI researcher and entrepreneur Trent McConaghy discusses how blockchain will unlock the value of data by bridging the gap between the AI haves and have-nots and, in turn, helping to create the data economy.

Parag Khanna, a leading international relations expert, recently published the new book "The Future Is Asian: Commerce, Conflict and Culture in the 21st Century." He talks about the law of technology diffusion, breaks common myths about Asia's development, and questions whether the future belongs to cities or nation-states.

Elif Shafak, an award-winning British-Turkish author and human rights activist, discusses the polarization of culture springing out of the foundations of the open internet, and the ways to tackle the pervasive issues in today's digital technology sphere.

Marietje Schaake, a Dutch politician and member of the European Parliament (MEP) from the Netherlands, talks to Azeem Azhar about the governance of cyberspace, the responsibility of technology companies, and the new era of geopolitical competition in cyberspace.

Emil Eifrem is the CEO and cofounder of Neo4j, the graph database platform powering some of the largest companies today. He is the creator of the property graph model, and he coined the term "graph database" to describe the technology that would change how we understand big data.

Gina Neff, a senior research fellow and associate professor at the University of Oxford, explores technology development from a sociological perspective, as well as the implications of self-tracking and the quantified self for the individual and society.

Michael Liebreich, a leading global expert on clean energy and transportation, discusses the significance of the U.S. National Climate Assessment and IPCC's report, the importance of staying below two degrees, and the role of exponential technologies in transitioning to renewables.

Casper Klynge, the world's first tech ambassador, with a global mandate and staff in Copenhagen, Silicon Valley, and Beijing, assesses the current alignment between some of the largest technology companies and nation-states and discusses the role of technology in fostering democracy and innovation.

Kate Raworth, senior visiting research associate at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute, discusses the Doughnut economics framework as the essence of rethinking economics for a world inhabited by 10 billion people and hit by climate change and social justice struggles. Kate sets a vision for an equitable and sustainable future.

Anousheh Ansari, the world's first female private space explorer and the first Iranian astronaut in space, discusses the ways space development could help us tackle climate change and pollution and achieve sustainable crypto mining. She shares about her journey to become a space explorer, her time on the International Space Station, and her role as the CEO of XPrize.

Lisa Witter, an award-winning executive, a serial entrepreneur, and the cofounder and executive chairman of Apolitical, discusses reviving trust in government, the road map for building the public service workforce of the future, and the role of agile in governance.

Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts, a UK organization committed to finding practical solutions to societal problems, discusses the well-being economy, the meaning of good work in an age of automation, and the state of democracy.

Azeem Azhar and Dr. Mariarosaria Taddeo, deputy director of the Digital Ethics Lab at the Oxford Internet Institute, unpack the state of cybersecurity and warfare, the complex symbiosis between governments and criminal actors, and the ways digital technologies are changing cyber warfare.

Azeem Azhar speaks with venture capitalist Bill Janeway about the three-player game between the mission-driven state, financial speculators, and markets in the innovation economy. Are we stuck on the dark side of this configuration? How do we move forward?

Kai-Fu Lee, a VC investor, technology executive, and one of the most prominent figures in the Chinese internet sector and AI, discusses the Chinese government's techno-utilitarian approach to technology, the ambition of China's technology founders, and the future of job automation.

We’ve experienced a manifestation of new behaviors, driven by the underlying shifts around the democratic process: the transition from broadcast media to niche media moderated by dominant social media platforms.
Have these behaviors hacked our democracy? For better or for worse? Azeem discusses these questions with Carole Cadwalladr, Luciano Floridi, Hari Kunzru, Tom Loosemore.

Dr. Danny Lange, VP of AI and machine learning at Unity, discusses the role of machine learning technologies in revolutionizing the ways games are developed and monetized. Dr. Lange talks about the significance of the undergoing paradigm shift in computing, the OODA loop in machine learning, and what happens to software engineers when their trade becomes obsolete.

Author Philip Auerswald talks about “code” in a broader meaning of the word — it is the “how” of human productivity, the manner in which we create, refine, and implement the infrastructure that forms a human society. The advancements of code, from the Neolithic era to the modern times, have driven identity and work reinvention.

Scott Santens, a writer and an advocate for universal basic income, talks about why he believes “citizen's salary” is a necessary measure for our societies to deal with tech unemployment by providing an independent income floor.

Marko Ahtisaari, the CEO and cofounder of The Sync Project, presents ideas and projects born out of the vision that in the near future people will use non-drug modalities to heal, enhance well-being, and assist in therapy. He guides us through the recent experiment Unwind.ai, which uses your heart rate to select the tracks that will bring you peace of mind.

Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs, one of the world’s foremost thinkers on economic development, talks about how technology has improved the lives of countless humans. He explores how automated systems will increasingly replace both routine and high-skill jobs.

A wide-ranging conversation on technology with Jason Pontin, editor-in-chief of MIT Technology Review. He touches on gene editing, Moore's Law, artificial intelligence, Facebook and fake news, and what ties all these disparate strands together.

Ryan Avent, economics columnist at The Economist, and Azeem Azhar explore issues around digital technologies and how they will continue to exponentially change the relationship between capital and labor.